Xbox One Teardown: Yet Another PC in Game Clothing

OTTAWA, Canada — It’s clear we’re in the run-up to the gift-giving season, with multiple launches of tablets and gaming systems. Last week was the turn of the Microsoft Xbox One, and it's hard to believe it's been twelve years since the first Xbox was launched, and eight years since the Xbox 360. There have been a few upgrades since the first 360, but now it’s time for a complete rework. We haven’t rushed to get this teardown completed as we did with the Sony PS4, since we were helping the iFixit guys with their teardown in New Zealand, and they were almost a day ahead of what we could do here in Ottawa. Now we’re done, so let’s have a look!

Style is a personal thing, but the new console looks cleaner and simpler than the earlier generations, although it still has a separate power brick to get in the way, unlike the Sony PS4.

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This device is nothing but at PC, a PC has all the interfaces listed with this game box, ultimately it is an additional PC in the home, Sony and Microsoft should think in the direction of reducing the hardware in home, by enabling multiple usage of a device, we will be waiting for an emulator to use the gamebox as a PC.

From a purely hardware perspective, the Xbox & Xbox 360 were also just "nothing but a PC." But from the software side, the user interface side (game controllers & headsets) and the overall ecosystem, they were always entertainment devices -- far more so than most desktop PCs. It looks like MS has further extended the entertainment capabilities with the Xbox One, and I wish them lots of success in the marketplace.

reducing the hardware?...I see the opposite trend, we all have more devices at home...in 10 years I have gone from 1 (just PC) to 10 (PC, 3 laptops, 2 smartphones, 2 tablets, appleTV, console)...if you reduce teh hardware where is teh revenue growth coming from?

With the economies of scale why would anyone use anything but pc parts? From a software perspective Sony has learned that having unique development requirements limits the games developed for your console - even if you are faster and better. The new PS4 has a SoC with 2 Quad Core x86 cpus and 20 AMD Graphic cores and porting to it should be as easy as porting to the XBox from a PC.

Also, these consoles are nothing like PC's - normal consumer PC's. They are much more powerful, and while you can make PC's that are quicker - that is not a target audience, and these new consoles are going to speed up the downfall of the desktop PC...

the text reads " .. The main processor chip has the same style of heat-dissipating package as the PS4 CPU,.. "

Why are we calling this a Heat Dissipating Package ?

The heat is generated in the large die in the middle where there does not seem to be any heat sink, not by the passives surrounding it. If by " heat dissipating package " the window frame like metal around the die is being referred to, then where is the thermal path from the large die to this metal part ?

Is it more likely that the metal frame is there as a Stiffener for a new type of thinner but electrically more efficient substrate ( PCB ) under the processor chip ?

This could be easily verified by looking at the x - sections as I had commented to earlier Teardown of the PS4.

Again Marvel is lucky to get placed for serving Networking functionalities in XBox, but as compared to Sony Playstation, Xbox is using only one Network Chip, it seems that the network software stack might be efficiently able to cater the XBox controller and Wireless Communication with the Internet.

Nothing wrong with being built from PC parts, makes it economical and uses best practice for that level of number crunching. I would have been more surprised if it had been an ARM core! Okay they (Sony or Microsoft) didn't use PowerPC again, but given they are trying to keep costs down doing a deal with AMD should achieve that.

The big failure is their handling of 50Hz, really? Adding an extra frame every 5th frame to boost it to 60Hz?